Evolving Engagement Models and Skillsets in the Age of Business Transformation

By Raj Vattikuti, Founder and Chairman of Altimetrik Corp

Technology is changing the world at a speed never seen before. This is dramatically changing customer behavior and their expectations from businesses, who are struggling hard to keep up to the tide. Business transformation is what every enterprise needs today to stay relevant in the near future, which goes beyond the purview of what digital transformation alone brings to the table.

This is also changing the way business has traditionally engaged with technology, which was a lot more in silo and disparately connected. Today, technology is the key driving force in the way businesses run both internally and externally. The expectation of the business from technology, therefore, is now more connected and integrated. Hence, traditional engagement models are failing in several instances and new technology models are gaining more success in their partnerships.

The point being that business transformation requires a whole new approach and a different set of people with specific skill sets. Forward looking enterprises who are seriously looking at modernizing their business and evolving customer experience, need a special type of companies to partner with as compared to traditional consulting and outsourcing models.

What does it mean? Enterprises are looking for companies who bring ‘practitioners’ who can create end-to-end solutions, and work with both business and technology to achieve relevant business outcomes. They have the ability to create the business transformation architecture based on their horizontal domain-based knowledge.

Practitioners are people who work closely with business to identify and define the set of business outcomes, prioritize, and build an incremental roadmap, instead of a typical big bang approach that usually fails to address definitive issues. Especially when it comes to data related transformation, practitioners are able to define the relevant sources of data. Then they bring data engineering scrum teams who assimilate data from various sources and connect them back to business. They are also the data scientists who work with the business and technology teams to apply the effective algorithms, build dashboards, and provide effective and predictive analytics. Then there are the transformation product engineering teams who ultimately create the products that are derived from these insights and are built to deliver outcomes.

Another crucial part of a business transformation program is the discipline and the governance framework that centrally manages, monitors, and ensures the effectiveness of the initiative. Enterprises need to focus on an innovation framework that helps in maintaining this discipline and add more value to the whole transformation exercise.

This is applicable to every business, be it in the retail, manufacturing, healthcare, automotive or the financial services domain, where change is rapid and directly affects the consumer. It takes one disruptor to bite the largest chunk of pie from established behemoths in any domain. As Einstein has famously said, “we cannot solve our problems using the same thinking we used when we created them.” We have several examples where the failure to evolve the thought process has led to the extinction of successful, established businesses.

Today, however, I feel quite hopeful as I see many enterprises have started to change their thinking towards technology and the providers they choose as partners. It will be interesting to wait and watch the remarkable outcomes these new partnerships will bring to the market and to consumers.